Lectern is an async and concurrent rewrite of PHP's Composer package manager in Rust. Built with lots of help from ChatGPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4[.5].

• ⚡ Optimized outdated command with better caching and increased concurrency (50x parallelism)
• 🚀 HTTP connection pooling with persistent connections and HTTP/2 multiplexing
• 📦 New commands added: create-project, dump-autoload, run-script, diagnose, clear-cache, depends, prohibits, browse, suggests, fund
• 🔧 Modular codebase with better organized command structure
• 💾 Improved caching with multi-layered in-memory and disk caching

Lectern is not a complete replacement for Composer just yet! Some things I haven't been able to test (as AI wrote that code), or aren't of high priority.

• Composer compatible plugin system
• Testing of private packages and git repositories
• Implement remaining Composer commands (config, global, archive)
• Further optimize dependency resolver with constraint caching

Lectern significantly outperforms Composer across all common operations. Our benchmarks use hyperfine for accurate performance measurements with automatic cache warm-up and multiple test runs.

Performance Highlights:

• 🚀 Install: ~21x faster
• ⚡ Update: ~17x faster
• 🔍 Outdated: ~152x faster
• 📦 Require: ~18x faster
• ✨ Show: ~24x faster

To run the benchmarks yourself:

./bench.sh

This will:

1. Build Lectern in release mode
2. Run comprehensive benchmarks comparing Lectern vs Composer
3. Generate a detailed report in BENCHMARK.md

Requirements:

• hyperfine - Install via cargo install hyperfine or your package manager
• Composer installed and available in PATH

See BENCHMARK.md for the complete benchmark report with detailed timing information and statistical analysis.

• Lectern uses a global user cache directory by default. It will use $XDG_CACHE_HOME/lectern when the XDG environment is set, otherwise ~/.cache/lectern.
• To clear the cache manually, remove that directory (for example rm -rf ~/.cache/lectern).

• A GitHub Actions workflow has been added to publish the crate to crates.io when a GitHub release is published: .github/workflows/publish.yml.
• You must add a repository secret named CRATES_IO_TOKEN (your crates.io API token) for publishing to work. The workflow uses this secret to run cargo publish.

Installs the dependencies listed in the composer.json file. Equivalent to composer install.

Updates the dependencies to the latest versions allowed by the composer.json file. Equivalent to composer update.

Checks for outdated dependencies and displays the current and latest versions.

Searches for a package on Packagist and displays relevant results.

Adds a new dependency to the composer.json file and installs it.

Removes a dependency from the composer.json file and uninstalls it.

Displays detailed information about a specific package.

Shows the autoloader setup.

Initializes a new project with a composer.json file.

Lists installed packages and their statuses.

Displays the licenses of installed dependencies.

Validates the composer.json file for correctness.

Creates a new project from a package (similar to composer create-project).

Regenerates the autoloader files.

Runs a script defined in composer.json.

Diagnoses the system to identify common problems.

Clears Lectern's cache (types: all, repo, files).

Shows which packages depend on a given package (similar to composer why).

Shows which packages prevent installing a given package (similar to composer why-not).

Opens the package repository URL in your browser.

Shows all suggested packages from installed dependencies.

Shows funding information for installed packages.